Sink your teeth into it with Ayun Halliday, sole employee of The East Village Inky. Dare to Be Heinie!

Monday, October 02, 2006

I'm back with Huevos Rancheros!

Yeah, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and if apologies if you've been experiencing delays traveling it lately, seeing as how it was clogged like a bad drain with my big ol' carcass.

But I'm back, back from summer, back from the summer palace, back from the Dirty Sugar Tours, both live and virtual. Perhaps the biggest thing that happened to me, while we were absent, one from the other, is I fell a little bit head over heels with Austin, Texas. Not enough to move there - it's more of a Same Time, Next Year sort of deal. I mean I still haven't seen the bats. Can't go quiet until I see me them bats.

I did experience the wonders of the Box Springs Hogs,the best thrift store of my life, and the Austin Motel's sign f'ing the jet-lagged dawn like some giant neon salam'. And oh my lordie, the Mexican food. We don't have such a reliable cornucopia of that here in N Y F'in C. It's a crying shamethat I can't reproduce me El Sol Y La Luna's chori migas w/ vegetarian chorizo for your dining pleasure. (I would've said it's un petit mort, but for all I know that's a single entendre phrase, & I don't care to be corrected on ma francais, the way I'm corrected on the proper way to cook eggplant.) All I can do is offer up the Huevos Rancheros I've been meaning to post since late July, when I prepared them for Little MoMo to buck her up after a year of motherhood.

Huevos Rancheros

First you got to Refrito Some Frijoles, hombre, so tie on a couple of margaritas and get cracking the night before by tossing

in your 2 gallon iron sombrero with enough water to cover them. Simmer for hours, enough hours to watch The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, which is deserving of a Special Lifetime Achievement Award for former teen star Melissa Leo's seated, non-airbrushed, gloriously flabby 40-year-old nude scene! That girl is seated at the right hand of Kathy Bates, About Schmidt's hot tub heroine! Don't get so caught up in this gloriously real display of female flesh that you forget to check on your beans. You've got to water them every half hour or so, maybe salt them up a bit, and let em cook for another 30 minutes after they've gone all softy on you.

Hit rewind and heat a 1/4 cup of olive oil in a Texas-sized heavy skilletAdd 3/4 cup of onion (i.e. the rest of the onion)and a couple of cloves of finely chopped garlic

After 3 minutes, introduce them to the remains of a finely chopped tomato.Chaperone that party for another 5 minutes, after which you can eithera) turn the fire off and go to bedorb) keep going by Adding the drained beans to the skillet a cup at a time, mashing them with the back of a wooden spoon, or the heel of your boot, or some other such unyielding implement with the capacity for mashing.

Now then, amigos, let us hithee ho toward The Sauce!

Wash 4 dried ancho chilis, then drown them in some agua caliente! (No, not vodka! Save that for yourself! A cup of hot water's good enough for the likes of those withered donkey foreskins!) Let them soak for half an hour while you lay down with a cool cloth across your eyes to recover from the Deadwood-like vulgarities of your guide.

When the chilis are soft, relieve them of their seeds and stems and subject them to the blender, along with:a big, undrained can of tomatoes a clove of garlic, smashed or coarsely chopped1/2 teaspoon of oreganoand another cup-sized onion, as recommended by the National Onion Council.Give em a whiz biz biz.Or don't. I did a bad thing to my blender at the summer palace this summer. It smelled like burning. As a result, I had no choice but to go lumpy which is fine because that's just the way I like it!!! Just chop a little finer, if you're going that route.

Heat a two tablespoons of olive oil in a skillet, a heavy one, because that's how me and Melissa and Kathy like 'em!Add your saucea little salta little peppera handful of chopped cilantroand a tablespoon of red wine vinegar or really, any damn vinegar you can rustle up from the depths of the cabinetry, with the possible exception of raspberry.Stir attentively for five minutes or you'll be calling your stovetop Freckles.

Mercy, is it Time To Assemble? Already? We've only been working on this for what? Two months? Feels like just under two hours. My how the time flies when you're recommending movies you should see again yourself, just to be sure.

Everybody gets a corn tortilla that you zap, front and back, on the burner so it gets floppy and warm, like my same sex lover, Melissa Leo!

Everybody gets a big spoonful of bean mix spread on top! (Reheat it if assembled the night before. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to insult your intelligence, but if I'm not mistaken, you were going to correct me on my French.)

Everybody gets a fried egg on top of that! (My, but it's convenient the way eggs come packaged by the dozen, because this recipe should yield enough to make 12 of these huevo-stacks. (which in my humble opinion serves three.)

Everybody gets a spoonful of (not cold) tomato sauce!

Don't eat it yet, because everybody gets a thin slice of cheese! Queso or Monterey Jack! Think pale, but not Dutch!

Bring it on home with some avocado and a lime wedge.

(Homegirl inhaled them huevos so rapido, the only breakfast table portrait available for publication is one shot the following day, when I tanked her up on leftover brown rice, simmered with coconut milk, brown sugar, and bananas.)

∞

Thanky for your patience while I was playing hooky! I can swear beyond a shadow of a doubt that I'll be back by October 5, when the tables turn and it'll be my pleasure to host a pitstop on a virtual book tour for a book I didn't write, the extremely necessary What To Drink With What You Eat by Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page. (If you're in need of a quenching right now, they recommend Champagne, Riesling and Sauvignon Blanc for washing down Huevos Rancheros).

(on the left is what Little MoMo's been working on for the last year.)